This cooperation between the Humanities and computer science will be continued and institutionalized in the newly founded JMU Center for Philology and Digitality. OCR4all originates from the JMU Kallimachos project, which is funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research. The new OCR4all tool was developed under the direction of Christian Reul together with his computer science colleagues Professor Frank Puppe (Chair of Artificial Intelligence and Applied computer science) and Christoph Wick as well as Uwe Springmann (Digital Humanities expert) and numerous students and assistants. With previous tools of this kind, user-friendliness was not always given as the users mostly had to work with programming commands.ĭeveloped in cooperation with the humanities And it offers a graphical user interface that requires no IT expertise. It converts digitized historical prints with an error rate of less than one percent into computer-readable texts. With OCR4all, the JMU research team is making a new tool available to the scientific community. Scientists at the Center for Philology and Digitality at Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg (JMU) in Bavaria, Germany, have made a significant contribution to further development in this field. However, there is still a challenge to overcome: bringing the digitized old fonts into a modern form with text recognition software that is readable for non-specialists as well as for computers. For research purposes, this is already a step forward. Many of these documents have now been digitized - usually photographed or scanned - and are available online worldwide. Historians and other Humanities' scholars often have to deal with difficult research objects: centuries-old printed works that are difficult to decipher and often in an unsatisfactory state of conservation.

view moreĬredit: Dresden State and University Library, CC BY-SA 4.0 Such old fonts can be reliably converted into computer-readable text with OCR4all. Image: Page from a french version of the 'Narrenschiff' (Ship of Fools).

None readable ocr font